Myself I would claim a 160kbps AAC file sounds better than a 256kbps MP3 file, and the 'factual' basis is my own ears.
Decide what bitrate you want by what sounds best. For some ears and headphones, 128kbps aac is equivalent to 256kbps mp3. But if I was going to save space anyway, I thought I might as well get better quality just in case I ever get better headphones.
iTunes does one important thing (though other programs can do this too) and that is create an index, a database, a file that contains information for all your songs, that is uploaded to the iPod that allows the iPod to function.
This index is the library file: Think of it as a card catalog in a library, or a directory at a mall, or a index in the back of a book. It allows the iPod to do three things: Be fast, efficient, and power thrifty.
Instead of scanning through the whole hard drive for ID3 info, it scans through an 11mb file stored in ram. This allows the iPod to be both fast and power thrifty when you're searching for a song, album, artist, or playlist.
As per copying the files and folders, you can copy them on and off the hard drive, because it's just a mass storage device. But going back to that index thing, iTunes (or another similar program) will copy the music into a specified Music folder so that the index and content are always in sync.
As per shuffling across a bunch of CDs, yes, you can do that.
You have one problem that would prevent you from being happy with the iPod: You want to do all the work and don't want the computer to do any of the work. By default iTunes will sort all your music by artist and album into their own folders: Folder "John Coltrane" will contain folder "Blue Train" will contain all your music.
Then, with the iTunes interface, all you have to care about is: "Who is the artist?" or "What is the album?" or "What is the song?" or "What is the genre?" or "Who is the composer?" or "How many times has it been played?" or "What year was it recorded?"
That's the other thing about the index/database. iTunes uses it too, so if you want to, you have access to all your music in any myriad number of ways OTHER than artist-album.
It's actualy $130 less for the same capacity iPod, so the only real question is, "Is the iPod > $130 better than the Zen?"
If the answer is yes, then the iPod is the better buy.
Another question is, "Is the iPod > $30 better, despite being half the capacity, of the Zen?"
And if the answer is yes, then the iPod is the better buy.
The Zen is bigger and heavier; The software, according to reviews, is crappy until you buy RedChair's Notmad software; It locks up, according to reviews; It isn't a mass storage device;
But again, it is your money at stake. I've already got myself a 10gb iPod.
Inferior really is relative. The difference between the products, to me, is great enough that buying a Creative Zen Touch is like wasting $200 while buying an Apple iPod isn't.
No, I believe that the average person buying an iPod already has spent $$$$ and is using the iPod in 3 manners: CD Jukebox Realtime Archive Live soundtrack
As a Jukebox the iPod multiplies the value of your music. A CD/music is useless to you if you can't access the one you don't have on you. As an archive the iPod doubles the value of your music. It means you can lose/destroy your $300 iPod and still have your iTunes music library, and you can lose your computer/iTunes music library and still have your original CDs/collection in hard format. This means $600 of CDs (40-70 CDs) is doubly insured against loss or damage. Or $2,400 of CDs (160-280 CDs) A live soundtrack means you have music all the time. Your CD/music is useless to you if you can't listen to it.
I've only spent $8 on iTMS, but over $3,000 on CDs alone in my short life.
So use my analogy of $25 an hour meaning you could spend an hour downloading 20 songs or spend $20 to spend 10 minutes to download the same number of songs from the iTMS. That STILL leaves you with 50 minutes of that hour to do something else like: Read a book Garden Fix a leak Watch TV Play a video game Eat dinner Make dinner.
The value proposition works. If your time is worth money, then spending 10 minutes on iTMS is saving you money.
So a few minutes = $0.99 Lets say three minutes Or $0.33 a minute. If you work 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 4 weeks a month, that's a little over $3100. You're telling me your time is worth $19.80 an hour.
So if you earn more than that, spending a few minutes looking for a song is actually a waste of time. If you earn, say, $25 an hour, then that minute you spent looking for music could be better spent elsewhere.
An alternative that might have consumer interest would have: MORE content. A lot of p2p stuff is modern or pop. MORE secure. Lawsuits aren't indications that the current medium is secure. MORE useful. Being able to find what you want quickly is great. MORE convenient. Being able to find what you want easily is even better.
Free isn't the only selling point. iPods sell like hotcakes despite being not free. The iTMS also happens to be a popular alternative, though it hasn't YET hit the scale of free p2p, I only see it as an eventuality when it blankets the entire globe, when the libraries are universally licensed, and when the libraries are bigger then p2p libraries.
In terms of 'training sets', pop3 email definitely counts. So as long as their software 'learns' against pop3 email and that learning is verified (via clickthrus and such) on the webmail 'training sets', pop3 email is still useful.
Just knowing what is being talked about, what's hot, what's topical, and what is prevalent is important.
It makes their algorithms more accurate with more data available.
So even if you never see an ad, and they never make a cent through some kind of clickthrough on you, every email that goes through their system tells them more about the contextual online universe.
Google is ultimately in a data mining position. Data is money for them. Email is data.
Each unit can actually store five 'profiles' such that when it's moved among several places, it can use the settings for that location. I've a co-worker with one, but I haven't used one.
Setup is as easy as any other Mac networking product (Airport, Airport Extreme, Mac OS X).
As long as there exists a manual override to deal with exceptions and the same system is being used to highlight and reward model customers. It should be a system to improve shopping and not just to reduce risk from bad customers.
But Google ISN'T a news source. They are at best an aggregator, at worst an index.
Their integrity as an aggregator or index may be reduced by this, but news source? Maybe in a year when they've decided to enter into the 'information modeling' field, but right now their only fault is not being as good a search engine as the competition.
You can be a geek who cares about the better product and buy and use an iPod with AAC as the iPod is a better product and AAC is the better standard (than MP3). And if you want lossless, the iPod ALSO supports ALE, which is either AAC Lossless Encoding or Apple Lossless Encoding.
The benefits of Ogg are patent encumbrance... and patent encumbrance.
If you care about low bitrates on portable devices, you might as well get the next bigger version of the iPod instead ^^
The early adopters had two ways to fill up their iPods:
p2p networks CD collections
If you had 100 CDs, and 14 tracks a CD, and 1mb per minute, and about 3 minutes per song, so 3mb per track, or 42mb per CD, they would have roughly 4200mb of music.
That also translates to at $12 per CD, $1,200 of music. Not so far off from your iPod mini calculation.
If they bought all their CDs brand new at $19 a cd, that's $1,900 of music.
If they had 200 CDs... Or compilations...
See, iPods are dirt cheap compared to music. Some people, they have hundreds of gbs of legit music. Imagine someone who bought 5 CDs a month for 10 years; that's 60 CDs a year, or 600 CDs in 10 years. If 100CDs is 4gb, then 600 CDs is 24gb easily. And if you bought more than 5CDs a year... well, the cost of an MP3 player doesn't really amount to much at all.
Be careful. Buyer beware, this product may not be as good as the specs say... if these build quality and durability issues haven't been addressed that these reviews mention.
I mean, that's the iPod interface... iTunes. You have your artists, albums, genres, library, and playlists. You've got your song ratings, playcount, and per song EQ. You've got audio books and calendars and notes and contact lists. You also get photos and album art if you get the color iPod.
It's all manner of things. To acheive it's size the iPod has to have proprietary batteries: Look at the take apart sites, the iPod batteries are like credit cards!
And without all of these indexing and ram tricks, the battery life would be nowhere near 8 hours for the mini or 12 hours for the full sized.
Maybe in a year or two someone will be able to take an iPod mini drive, slap it into a full sized iPod shell, with regular AAA batteries and still keep the performance and battery life, but right now it's physically impossible. Sorry.
For me the cost of charging overnight is zero. It's one of those tradeoffs for size, performance, and convenience.
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Myself I would claim a 160kbps AAC file sounds better than a 256kbps MP3 file, and the 'factual' basis is my own ears.
Decide what bitrate you want by what sounds best. For some ears and headphones, 128kbps aac is equivalent to 256kbps mp3. But if I was going to save space anyway, I thought I might as well get better quality just in case I ever get better headphones.
iTunes does one important thing (though other programs can do this too) and that is create an index, a database, a file that contains information for all your songs, that is uploaded to the iPod that allows the iPod to function.
This index is the library file: Think of it as a card catalog in a library, or a directory at a mall, or a index in the back of a book. It allows the iPod to do three things: Be fast, efficient, and power thrifty.
Instead of scanning through the whole hard drive for ID3 info, it scans through an 11mb file stored in ram. This allows the iPod to be both fast and power thrifty when you're searching for a song, album, artist, or playlist.
As per copying the files and folders, you can copy them on and off the hard drive, because it's just a mass storage device. But going back to that index thing, iTunes (or another similar program) will copy the music into a specified Music folder so that the index and content are always in sync.
As per shuffling across a bunch of CDs, yes, you can do that.
You have one problem that would prevent you from being happy with the iPod: You want to do all the work and don't want the computer to do any of the work. By default iTunes will sort all your music by artist and album into their own folders:
Folder "John Coltrane" will contain folder "Blue Train" will contain all your music.
Then, with the iTunes interface, all you have to care about is: "Who is the artist?" or "What is the album?" or "What is the song?" or "What is the genre?" or "Who is the composer?" or "How many times has it been played?" or "What year was it recorded?"
That's the other thing about the index/database. iTunes uses it too, so if you want to, you have access to all your music in any myriad number of ways OTHER than artist-album.
The iPod has had this forever, possible as a software revision to the first 5gb iPod!
Go for it, it's only your money :)
It's actualy $130 less for the same capacity iPod, so the only real question is, "Is the iPod > $130 better than the Zen?"
If the answer is yes, then the iPod is the better buy.
Another question is, "Is the iPod > $30 better, despite being half the capacity, of the Zen?"
And if the answer is yes, then the iPod is the better buy.
The Zen is bigger and heavier;
The software, according to reviews, is crappy until you buy RedChair's Notmad software;
It locks up, according to reviews;
It isn't a mass storage device;
But again, it is your money at stake. I've already got myself a 10gb iPod.
The iPod mini is $249, and the Micro is $249.
You mean the Creative Touch or Zen vs the iPod?
Inferior really is relative. The difference between the products, to me, is great enough that buying a Creative Zen Touch is like wasting $200 while buying an Apple iPod isn't.
No, I believe that the average person buying an iPod already has spent $$$$ and is using the iPod in 3 manners:
CD Jukebox
Realtime Archive
Live soundtrack
As a Jukebox the iPod multiplies the value of your music. A CD/music is useless to you if you can't access the one you don't have on you.
As an archive the iPod doubles the value of your music. It means you can lose/destroy your $300 iPod and still have your iTunes music library, and you can lose your computer/iTunes music library and still have your original CDs/collection in hard format. This means $600 of CDs (40-70 CDs) is doubly insured against loss or damage. Or $2,400 of CDs (160-280 CDs)
A live soundtrack means you have music all the time. Your CD/music is useless to you if you can't listen to it.
I've only spent $8 on iTMS, but over $3,000 on CDs alone in my short life.
So use my analogy of $25 an hour meaning you could spend an hour downloading 20 songs or spend $20 to spend 10 minutes to download the same number of songs from the iTMS. That STILL leaves you with 50 minutes of that hour to do something else like:
Read a book
Garden
Fix a leak
Watch TV
Play a video game
Eat dinner
Make dinner.
The value proposition works. If your time is worth money, then spending 10 minutes on iTMS is saving you money.
So a few minutes = $0.99
Lets say three minutes
Or $0.33 a minute. If you work 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 4 weeks a month, that's a little over $3100. You're telling me your time is worth $19.80 an hour.
So if you earn more than that, spending a few minutes looking for a song is actually a waste of time. If you earn, say, $25 an hour, then that minute you spent looking for music could be better spent elsewhere.
An alternative that might have consumer interest would have:
MORE content. A lot of p2p stuff is modern or pop.
MORE secure. Lawsuits aren't indications that the current medium is secure.
MORE useful. Being able to find what you want quickly is great.
MORE convenient. Being able to find what you want easily is even better.
Free isn't the only selling point. iPods sell like hotcakes despite being not free. The iTMS also happens to be a popular alternative, though it hasn't YET hit the scale of free p2p, I only see it as an eventuality when it blankets the entire globe, when the libraries are universally licensed, and when the libraries are bigger then p2p libraries.
Why do you think that neural interface devices wouldn't cause headaches, aneurysms, tumors, and strokes?
1.38 million PocketPCs shipped, vs 2.01 million iPods shipped last quarter.
Why only spam blocking?
In terms of 'training sets', pop3 email definitely counts. So as long as their software 'learns' against pop3 email and that learning is verified (via clickthrus and such) on the webmail 'training sets', pop3 email is still useful.
Just knowing what is being talked about, what's hot, what's topical, and what is prevalent is important.
It makes their algorithms more accurate with more data available.
So even if you never see an ad, and they never make a cent through some kind of clickthrough on you, every email that goes through their system tells them more about the contextual online universe.
Google is ultimately in a data mining position. Data is money for them. Email is data.
Each unit can actually store five 'profiles' such that when it's moved among several places, it can use the settings for that location. I've a co-worker with one, but I haven't used one.
Setup is as easy as any other Mac networking product (Airport, Airport Extreme, Mac OS X).
Hmm, maybe the print server and the speaker hookup for the AirTunes feature. Or the 'by design' plug and go feature of the Airport Express.
Either until you code it up, or you buy a Mac next year?
As long as there exists a manual override to deal with exceptions and the same system is being used to highlight and reward model customers. It should be a system to improve shopping and not just to reduce risk from bad customers.
But Google ISN'T a news source. They are at best an aggregator, at worst an index.
Their integrity as an aggregator or index may be reduced by this, but news source? Maybe in a year when they've decided to enter into the 'information modeling' field, but right now their only fault is not being as good a search engine as the competition.
You can be a geek who cares about the better product and buy and use an iPod with AAC as the iPod is a better product and AAC is the better standard (than MP3). And if you want lossless, the iPod ALSO supports ALE, which is either AAC Lossless Encoding or Apple Lossless Encoding.
The benefits of Ogg are patent encumbrance... and patent encumbrance.
If you care about low bitrates on portable devices, you might as well get the next bigger version of the iPod instead ^^
Because it's smaller.
Sometimes people want smaller things. Your Zen Extra is huge compared to the Zen Micro.
The early adopters had two ways to fill up their iPods:
p2p networks
CD collections
If you had 100 CDs, and 14 tracks a CD, and 1mb per minute, and about 3 minutes per song, so 3mb per track, or 42mb per CD, they would have roughly 4200mb of music.
That also translates to at $12 per CD, $1,200 of music. Not so far off from your iPod mini calculation.
If they bought all their CDs brand new at $19 a cd, that's $1,900 of music.
If they had 200 CDs...
Or compilations...
See, iPods are dirt cheap compared to music. Some people, they have hundreds of gbs of legit music. Imagine someone who bought 5 CDs a month for 10 years; that's 60 CDs a year, or 600 CDs in 10 years. If 100CDs is 4gb, then 600 CDs is 24gb easily. And if you bought more than 5CDs a year... well, the cost of an MP3 player doesn't really amount to much at all.
You don't need an SDK to do what you want.
:)
You record the word, in Chinese, and name it the appropriate Chinese word, then rip into iTunes, and then upload into the iPod.
Then the same with your Japanese language constructs.
You may even be able to do entire sentences and have the 'song title' scroll by displaying the Chinese or Japanese reading of it.
I'm not sure about conversations though. There has to be a practical limit to the title and ID3 info
There are also audio books available from Apple to learn Spanish, German, or Italian. There may even be more, I haven't checked.
Be careful. Buyer beware, this product may not be as good as the specs say... if these build quality and durability issues haven't been addressed that these reviews mention.
iTunes could be easier to use than WinAmp?
:)
I mean, that's the iPod interface... iTunes. You have your artists, albums, genres, library, and playlists. You've got your song ratings, playcount, and per song EQ. You've got audio books and calendars and notes and contact lists. You also get photos and album art if you get the color iPod.
That's what you get with the iPod, at least
It's all manner of things. To acheive it's size the iPod has to have proprietary batteries: Look at the take apart sites, the iPod batteries are like credit cards!
And without all of these indexing and ram tricks, the battery life would be nowhere near 8 hours for the mini or 12 hours for the full sized.
Maybe in a year or two someone will be able to take an iPod mini drive, slap it into a full sized iPod shell, with regular AAA batteries and still keep the performance and battery life, but right now it's physically impossible. Sorry.
For me the cost of charging overnight is zero. It's one of those tradeoffs for size, performance, and convenience.